Why the Tablet Will Never Replace the Laptop

Do Managed Services Really Save You Money? Why Yes Actually, They Do!

You always hear how Managed Services Providers (MSP) are geared to save you
money on your IT expenses. Problem is, it is always the MSP who is telling you
that. Just like Staples has the lowest prices – ahem, I mean Future Shop – or was
it Best Buy…?

I guess what I am saying is you have to consider the source.  Of course MSP’s
are going to tell you that they will save you money; cost is a huge consideration
after all, and they want to win your business. But this time it isn’t Syncronet (or
any other MSP) shouting it out – it’s a huge non-profit, well-known, independent
and trustworthy organization called the Computer Technology Industry Association
aka CompTIA.

Forecast Calls for Cloud – But with a Whole Lot of Rain to Boot

Whenever you consider a change to how you access and control your intellectual property – especially the cloud – you need to make sure you have considered everything, so read the fine print.  In many cases, the cloud has been an indispensable addition to the IT infrastructure.  It is scalable, reasonably inexpensive (with a few of the aforementioned caveats) and is indeed remarkably flexible.  And yes, there are limitations and many times the limitations are acceptable but sometimes they’re not.  Better to find out early in the game than later.  Do your homework or better yet, enlist Syncronet to do the homework for you.By now we have seen all the press clippings and hype on how the cloud has changed the world for the better and that if you are still running your back office in the front office – well, what are you waiting for?  Havent you heard?  The cloud will single-handedly revolutionize your business!  It will make you rich, free up all of your time and probably cure baldness too!  Ok, so maybe not but you get the point.  The cloud is pretty over hyped for sure.  And as someone who has helped many clients move many of their services to the cloud, I can honestly tell you, there is a dark side.  Don’t get fooled; much of the hype does not pass further inspection and you can be sure that like everything else in life, every pro has it’s con(job).  Here is a list of some stuff that got left off of the shiny marketing brochure the cloud services guy left behind.

1.  You are not in control – of anything.
This is the hardest part for most folks.  When issues arise (and they will), you cant just march into the server room and reboot.  Nor can you pick up the phone and yell at your network service provider or bull your way into the IT guys cubicle and raise Cain.  Nope – you or your IT provider will have to fill out a support ticket and wait in the queue with everyone else.  I know you have an SLA but it is still a bit unnerving to have suddenly have given up so much control and this is the harsh reality.

2.  You still need IT support people.
So you’re getting rid of all your servers and therefore, all your IT staff as well (or your outsourced IT support as the case may be).  Good luck with that.  Who will integrate it all for you? And who will deal with the regularly scheduled cloud app updates and the invariable fallout that they cause?  And who will your conduit be when the host has issues that are affecting your ability to be profitable?  You may well cut down on some or all of your current IT costs (that’s part of the reason for your move to the cloud, yes?), but running a business without IT support is a pipedream.

3.  You don’t have much choice in terms of granularity. 
Actually, you have none.  Or next to none.  Most cloud offerings are very up to date on the software that they run but if you think that you will get to configure absolutely every little nuance and option available, you are in for a rude awakening.  It costs the providers too much money to support every known configuration and in order to keep hosting costs down, they limit it to only the most common options.  If you want / need a specific configuration, you’d best make sure it is available before you sign the dotted line.  Henry Ford said it best: “You can have any colour you like as long as it’s black.”

4.  Don’t forget the hidden costs. 
See the above – you still need IT support staff, make no mistake.  And what about bandwidth?  Do you have enough because if there is anything a cloud-based service will consume, it’s bandwidth and lots of it. Almost every cloud provider I have seen neglects to make this most critical of points.  I don’t know if it is because they don’t know, don’t care, or are just afraid to tell you because it might scuttle the deal.  But just go look at any cloud-based service offering if you don’t believe me.  You will be hard pressed to find any mention of required bandwidth.  But bandwidth costs are very real, especially here in Vancouver.  So don’t forget to add that little gem into the ROI calculator.Whenever you consider a change to how you access and control your intellectual property – especially the cloud – you need to make sure you have considered everything, so read the fine print.  In many cases, the cloud has been an indispensable addition to the IT infrastructure.  It is scalable, reasonably inexpensive (with a few of the aforementioned caveats) and is indeed remarkably flexible.  And yes, there are limitations and many times the limitations are acceptable but sometimes they’re not. Better to find out early in the game than later.  Do your homework or better yet, enlist Syncronet to do the homework for you.

Whenever you consider a change to how you access and control your intellectual property – especially the cloud – you need to make sure you have considered everything, so read the fine print.  In many cases, the cloud has been an indispensable addition to the IT infrastructure.  It is scalable, reasonably inexpensive (with a few of the aforementioned caveats) and is indeed remarkably flexible.  And yes, there are limitations and many times the limitations are acceptable but sometimes they’re not.  Better to find out early in the game than later.  Do your homework or better yet, enlist Syncronet to do the homework for you.

New Years Resolutions – Or How I Learned to Love My Network

OK – so we’re at the end of Week 2 of 2012 and it’s time for a show of hands…  Who is still making it out to the gym 3 times a week?  Or getting up before dawn to go jogging (I don’t think so!)?  Or still on that slow carb diet?  Hello, anybody out there?  Bueller?  Bueller?

Alright, so maybe there’s a few of you still clinging to the notion that you will quit smoking, lose weight, take up yoga and <insert your self-improvement goal here>.  Fact is most folks have broken their resolution long before viewing the cute little fuzzy ducks on the second page of their 2012 calendar.

Here’s one that should be easy to keep:  Resolve to start treating your IT network as the business resource it really is.  Amazingly – or maybe not – many companies still need to get hit with a bigger stick when it comes to realizing the great business potential they have right at their fingertips (ahem, your computer network).  Taking the steps required to turn your network from a cost center into a unique competitive differentiator is not as “pie-in-the-sky” as it may sound.

Think of it this way: for every business problem, there is a technological solution.  From collecting business analytics to mobility for your road warriors to improving the customer experience; the opportunity to make real, quantifiable business improvements through the implementation of technology has never been better.  Want to one-up your competition?  Look for a pain point that is prevalent in your industry and then look to see how technology may have already addressed that issue.Obviously, you can’t (and shouldn’t) spend money on technology simply for the sake of it but if yo

u can identify an industry-wide problem that no one in your field of competitors has addressed and you can solve it with technology, you can use that as a competitive differentiator and quickly find yourself the model of your vertical with more customers than you can shake a stick at.

So resolve to leverage technology to improve your business.  I can’t promise you’ll lose weight and get in shape but I can guarantee you that you will make more money and hey, it’s a heck of lot easier (and more fun) than jogging on a cold, wet, dark February morning.

Top 10 Tech Quotes of 2011

Well, that year flew by in a flash didn’t it?  Seems like every time you turn around it’s Christmas again already – yikes!  Before that happens again, I thought it might be fun to look back at a snapshot of interesting quotes surrounding the tech sector.  Some are funny, some are irreverent and some are just plain irrelevant.  At any rate, and in keeping with the David Letterman Top 10 styling, here are my particular faves…

10.  ”There are only a few emotions that can effect change at a large organization. One is greed and another powerful one is fear.”
– A Google engineer explains to the journalist Steven Levy why his company built a social network to compete with Facebook.  Another example of our “me too” world.  Someone comes up with something cool and 100 others feel compelled to copy it.

9.  ”You’re the baddest bitch.”– A college student explains to Sheryl Sandberg, the C.O.O. of Facebook and the most prominent woman in Silicon Valley, just how inspirational she is.  Damn straight!  You go girl!

8.  ”I thought you were classier.” – In an spirited interview after Yahoo fired her, Carol Bartz told Fortune magazine that is what she said to Yahoo Chairman Roy Bostock when she called him six minutes later than scheduled and he launched into a prepared legal statement dismissing her (though not because she failed to call on time). “I said, ‘Roy, I think that’s a script … Why don’t you have the balls to tell me yourself?’” she also recalled in the Fortune interview, during which she referred to the board as “doofuses.” They “f—ed me over,” she said of the board.  Also classy: dropping F-bombs about your previous employer.

7.  ”Beware of the false cloud.”
– Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff in one of many rant-like tweets after Oracle dared to move a Benioff speech at OracleWorld.  Imagine the audacity, the unmitigated gall!

6.  ”That is such good advice, I could not have said it better myself.” - Not taking the Benioff statement lying down, Larry Ellison, in an Oct. 6 speech at OracleWorld, where he also called Salesforce.com’s flagship product “the roach motel” of the cloud. “You can check in, but you can’t check out … now that is a false cloud.  Let the bitch-slapping begin.

5.  ”We’ve gone from very small to very small but it’s been a heck of a year. You’re going to see a lot of progress in that market.”
- Steve Ballmer, referring to Microsoft’s Windows Phone 7 during a speech at the company’s Worldwide Partner Conference.  I, for one, will not be holding my breath.  Microsoft really has no presence in this space and it will be tough sledding to gain any sort of foothold.

4.  ”Steve was clearly the most outstanding business thinker. … He gets a reputation for being a strong leader and for being brash, but to me he was always justso kind and such a good friend.”– Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, on the death of Steve Jobs.  Clearly, there were two sides to Jobs.  Just read the eulogy by his step sister if you need proof.

3.  ”If you look at companies, whether it’s Google or Yahoo! or Microsoft that have search engines and ad networks, they also have a huge amount of information about you. It’s just that they’re collecting that about you behind your back, really.”– Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, during an interview with Charlie Rose, on the difference between Facebook’s approach to privacy and other web companies’.  Oh, I get it now – I guess the fact that “everyone else is doing it” makes it OK.  Except that it doesn’t.

2.  ”I think it’s more like we both had this rich neighbor named Xerox and I broke into his house to steal the TV set and found out that you had already stolen it.”- Bill Gates tells Steve Jobs that it’s not fair to accuse Microsoft of ripping off Apple.  There is damning documentation to support Jobs’ claims of intellectual piracy but you have have to admit it’s a great quote anyway.

And my #1 quote of 2011 goes to Steve Jobs himself…  I have to admit, as much as the Apple fan-boy thing makes me sick, I have a helluva lot more respect for Jobs dead than I ever had while he was alive.He might have been an colossal jerk, but was truly one of the great visionaries of our time.

1.  ”Oh wow, oh wow, oh wow.”- The final words of Steve Jobs

Do Managed Services Really Save You Money? Why Yes Actually, They Do!

You always hear how Managed Services Providers (MSP) are geared to save you money on your IT expenses. Problem is, it is always the MSP who is telling you that. Just like Staples has the lowest prices – ahem, I mean Future Shop – or was it Best Buy…?

I guess what I am saying is you have to consider the source. Of course MSP’s are going to tell you that they will save you money; cost is a huge consideration after all, and they want to win your business. But this time it isn’t Syncronet (or any other MSP) shouting it out – it’s a huge non-profit, well-known, independent and trustworthy organization called the Computer Technology Industry Association aka CompTIA.

Let’s face it – money makes the world go ’round and cost savings is THE biggest driver behind the adoption of cloud technologies. It is also one of most common reasons to outsource to an MSP. And with that being the case, this horse race is over and done. Nearly 100% of organizations polled indicate they have enjoyed substantial reductions in their IT spend since outsourcing some or all information services to an MSP.

Here are the numbers from a CompTIA survey of over 400 businesses (end-user organizations, NOT tech outfits) conducted in June this year:

• 46% have reduced their budgets by at least 25% or more
• 13% of the above have cut spending by over 50%
• 50% said they have cut annual costs by anywhere from 1% to 24%

Basically, over 96% of the respondents say Managed Services saves them money. Period. But are they getting the value they expect? You tell me:

• 89% of Managed Services users are very satisfied with their experience
• Reasons for happiness are many and varied: Uptime, Security, Contract flexibility, Ease of Use, etc.

Disbelievers take note. Outsourcing to an MSP works and now (finally) we have an independent body to stand behind what we have been saying for at least the last 5 years. And when you add additional costs savings through reduced unplanned downtime, it would be hard to imagine why anyone would resist outsourcing IT support, at least in some capacity.

At Syncronet, we’ve taken Managed Services to a whole new level. Many MSP’s are simply about remote monitoring and maintenance and while that’s all good and fine, Managed Services has evolved drastically in the last couple of years. It’s no longer enough to be a “trusted partner”; that’s become a table stake. And unlike the others, Syncronet has raised the bar. We’re all about IT as a business process and becoming a strategic ally. Check us out and get us In Sync With Your Business.

Information Technology as a Business Process

I’ve noticed an interesting trend of late that, in my humble opinion, is long overdue: the notion that IT support shouldn’t just be about keeping the network up and running anymore. And that if your provider is only looking to accomplish this, they (and by extension you) have missed the boat entirely. The reality is, IT support is only one of several roles you should expect help with from your service provider – a large one albeit – but only one of many roles.

As is often the case with thinking outside the Inbox, a paradigm shift is required to reposition information technology from the tired cliché of pocket protector wearing nerds, to an integral piece of the strategic planning process and ultimately, IT as a competitive differentiator. Yes, I did say that: Information Technology as a competitive differentiator. In short, computer technology needs to be treated as a business process no less important than your manufacturing, R & D, HR, accounting, (etc.) processes and that initiative needs to be driven from the top down. You will note two very important statements in that last paragraph:

1. IT as a business process
2. A top-down paradigm shift in thinking

Most businesses still consider computer networks, arguably the most powerful tool they use, as a cost center. And not just a cost center, but one to be vilified! We all know that most organizations live and die by their sales teams so imagine if we vilified our sales people the way we… OK, bad metaphor but you get the picture. Isn’t it time you started getting more out of IT? Leaders of organizations need to start thinking of IT as a process; a mindset that shifts technology expense from the spend bucket to the profit generator that it truly can and should be.

I do want to be clear here though: Technology is a wonderful thing. But its acquisition needs to have clear objectives: SMART goals, measureable ROI – you know, due process – not just technology because it’s cool or new. In other words, no technology for the sake of it, only technological solutions for business problems. Problems like competition, and the needto deliver more robust solutions to YOUR customers and clients; think “bigger, better, faster” and how technology can help you kick serious ass against your competitors.

Technology as an actual business solution is nothing new; I’m not reinventing the wheel here or even saying anything remotely revolutionary. But in our 19 years of experience, clearly we have noted that it’s no longer about a service provider merely helping you prevent downtime. That ability has long since become a table stake for Managed Service Providers (MSP). No, the true MSP must be able to transition from the role of basic service provider to trusted advisor and finally to strategic ally. Once proven worthy of achieving that coveted status, the “true” MSP then works with the customer to help them achieve real, quantifiable ROI on their IT expenditures which thereby translates to a better bottom line.

It’s no longer about Remote Monitoring and Maintenance, it’s more than just preventing downtime, its even more than being a royal advisor – its about helping businesses achieve their goals and visions by providing technological tools applied in a correct and efficient manner to provide a desirable, measurable goal. Like I said: IT as a business process. This is a natural evolution of IT as a service; you need to demand it from your provider if you aren’t already getting it.

Deciding on a Backup Strategy – Three Key Questions

Deciding on a backup strategy is not simple or easy – contrary to what online backup websites would have you believe. It takes careful consideration; what to backup and to where, how long to keep it, how quickly can I get it back if I need to, can I restore my entire business in the event of catastrophe… The list goes on. So what to do? Well, there are three key questions that, once answered should pave the way for the rest of your strategy:

• What is your tolerance to downtime: Can you last an hour? A day? A week?
• What is your tolerance to lost data: Can you stomach an hour? A day? A week?
• What is your budget? Do I have the funding I need to do it right? Will I need to make compromises?

Answering these three questions – by far and away the most important questions of all – will set you on the track to choosing your technology and determining your budget. So let’s look at a some typical scenarios.

Scenario 1: You are a the small “S” in “SMB”. You have less than 10 employees and although downtime hurts you too, you are less likely to go under as a result of it. Your budget is limited and speaking of budgets, you aren’t even really sure what it should cost or how much to allocate.

• “Our business is thrifty. It hurts when we are down but as long as I can be up and running again in a few days, we’ll survive.”
• “Most of our transactions with our customers are backed up by paper so worst case scenario, if I lost a couple of weeks’ worth of data, I could key it back in – it would hurt us, but it wouldn’t kill us.

Scenario 2: Suppose you are a typical firm of around 25 users, a couple of servers and a fairly high reliance on systems availability (sound like you?) and you have a budget that can tolerate expenditures that you can justify. The likely answers to questions 1 and 2 will be:

• “I hate being down – period. But I also understand that unless I have crazy amounts of cash, it may happen from time to time. Realistically, after a day, two at the absolute outside, our business is in serious crisis.”
• “Losing data is a total drag and I would love to be able to completely avoid it. Having said that, we are able to track a lot of our transactions through our vendors so if I lose a day or two, it hurts but I can live through it. If I lose a week, it will take a long time to recover though and maybe it even kills us.”

Scenario 3: You are a busy services firm (legal, financial, etc.) and downtime is simply not an option. Nor is lost data. Your budget is drawn up in advance and you have allocated sufficient funds to ensure this does not happen

• “We simply cannot be down – ever. No ifs, ands or buts about it. We lose over $20k an hour in downtime and worse than that, our customers simply will not tolerate it.”
• “We cannot lose data. If we lose more than 1 or 2 hours’ worth, we go under. If not from lost customers and revenue, then from the inevitable lawsuits and damage to our reputation.”

In terms of solutions, there are many available – from backing up to portable USB drives (not my first choice irrespective of budget), to tape backup, to disk based backup (with or without an offsite feature), to the ability to “spin up” your servers in the cloud.

Contrary to popular belief, tape backup is still very viable (I blogged about it here). It is reliable, reasonably fast (albeit sluggish when doing file level restores) and is still one of the cheapest ways to go. Tapes are portable, inexpensive and as long as you don’t leave them on the dashboard of your car in July, very reliable. I would highly recommend a tape solution for Scenario 1 as that particular business has a limited budget, they are not too concerned with downtime, and when managed properly, this solution has a relatively low risk for lost data. The key here is properly monitor your backups; not unlike any scenario, really. I wouldn’t use USB drives though – very slow and less reliable than tape for sure.

Disk based backups are all the rage these days and for good reason. Very little management overhead (no tapes to swap), very fast restores (especially file level restores; tape will best it though for very large restores), and a low cost of entry. The downside with disk based backups is the lack of portability which means you need to match it up with an offsite strategy and this is where it starts to get more costly than tape. Offsite storage is not as cheap as it looks especially if you want to have multiple versions of files or you plan to archive (think compliance) for long periods of time. And if you fall into Scenario 2, where lost data and extended downtime really start to sting, then you can probably justify the extra cost.

But if you are in Scenario 3, you have precious little risk aversion. You need uptime and you need guaranteed data accessibility. If you think are in this bucket, not only do you need a disk based backup strategy, but you need to be able to recover lost server – even lost sites – fast! Your solution calls for onsite disk based backup with replication to the cloud and the ability to host your servers in the cloud if you lose your entire site. You can do all of these things – it will cost you but you have budgeted for it and can justify the additional expense.

And you know, we have not touched on the complex part: actual backup strategies. What to backup, how often, how many versions, etc. Therein lies the complexity but hopefully your outsourced IT managed services outfit will take care of that for you. If they don’t, well… you probably have a bigger issue.

At Syncronet, we understand backups and all their inherent complexities and the fact that there is no “one size fits all” solution. If you are worried about your backups, maybe it’s time to rethink your strategy and give us a call.

What’s the Price of Good Fire Insurance?

Here’s some questions for you: Did you buy fire insurance for your house or business last year? Did anything burn down? No?Are you angry about that? Didn’t think so. Here’s another question for you: Are you intending on buying fire insurance this year? Thought so. Obviously, those of us who have it within our means wouldn’t dream of rolling without fire insurance for home or business. OK – last question: Do you have insurance against the #1 killer or successful businesses and / or do you know what the #1 business killer is? Answer: Downtime – or to be more accurate – unplanned downtime.

So what is the cost of unplanned downtime? It depends on the kind of business you are in. If you are an online retailer, unplanned downtime is simply not an option – to be down could kill you in a matter of a few hours. For others it’s less. Gartner released a report a few years back that indicated the average $5M company (if there is such a thing as an average company) burns up about $2K per hour. A real-life example from a customer of ours with ~75 desktops worked out their losses to be $20K per hour. Ouch!

What if there was a way to prevent that or at least mitigate the risk? Would you pay an insurance premium that saved you that kind of dough by way of prevention? Most people would. Especially if you consider that the premium paid could more than pay for itself in preventing the huge losses that unplanned downtime represents. But I am getting a little ahead of myself here. One needs to have a clear picture of what “unplanned downtime” actually is. Most folks think unplanned downtime is a network wide crash or outage. And while that certainly qualifies for the definition, downtime comes in other forms as well. Things like a single server outage as opposed to multiple servers; one that takes out say the CRM or file and print or email. Network slowdowns are another fine example. Or a virus attack, or spam problems or… well, I think you get the picture. Basically, anything that causes a loss of production big or small can be defined as unplanned downtime.

Defending against unplanned downtime is not all that hard but there are some prerequisites – and here’s where we get into the whole “fire insurance” thing. First off, you need an IT support company that has built a mature manages services offering. One that sees 24 x 7 x 365 remote monitoring with an alerting system, emergency after-hours support, help desk and multiple field techs (sorry, the one-man show just ain’t enough anymore), and a system of remote access that allows server reboots even if they are powered down due to a power outage.

Does that cost money? Yup, but so does fire insurance and you still buy that whether you use it or not. Having a managed services provider like Syncronet on your team is like having an insurance policy against unplanned downtime and the risk of unplanned downtime is far greater than the risk of fire – hands down no contest.

So – are your insurance premiums up to date? Give us a shout to find out how Syncronet managed services has consistently made us one of Vancouver’s best outsourced IT support providers since 1992.

Ooops – pardon my rudeness…

The most popular method of business communication is by far and away (wait for it…) – email! Wow, what a revelation – now tell me something I don’t know.

While that certainly is no a-ha moment, email leaves a helluva lot to be desired as a method of communication. It has become the easy way out to NOT have to make a phone call or have a face to face meeting over a difficult subject (coward!) and it has also made us all fat and lazy. Don’t believe me? Then answer me this: how many times have you sent an email to your work mate down the hall or even right next door? I’m betting that 99% of you do it regularly – I know I catch myself doing it all the time. Alas… what happened to the good old days when people used to talk, face to face, where body language takes its rightful place as the true determiner of what the spoken word REALLY means? You can’t do body English in an email, at least not yet.

I guess we are stuck with email for the foreseeable future at least. And while I may not always be the – ahem, most politically correct or polite person in the room – I think that we could all clean up our email correspondence a little to avoid some otherwise unintended brusqueness. So to keep email from running roughshod over what is left of our lives, think about these simple suggestions. It will make your life easier, more productive and you’ll probably piss off a lot less people.

• We are all up against it in terms of time. Set aside blocks of time during the day in which you will respond to emails. You can do it once, twice or even three times a day but if you are responding as they arrive, you are guilty of the committing the biggest time-burn known to man. Set aside a couple of blocks of time during the day and for God’s sake, turn off that damned Outlook desktop notification window! Its siren song will lead you to a shipwreck of a schedule. You may also want to add a tag to your signature: “Thank you for your email. I always make best effort to respond within 24 hours.” Or 48 or whatever works. Just set an email schedule and stick to it.
• Keep your emails to the point. We don’t have time to read a book. State your point and get on with it already. Make the subject of the email describe the email and if all you have is one sentence, put it in the subject line followed by EOM (end of message). That way, those of us who use the preview pane will know we don’t need to open the message. For example… Subject: See you in an hour for lunch EOM. That is better than Subject: Lunch Body: See you in an hour for lunch. I don’t need to open the email to get what I need from the email.
• Be extremely careful about what you say about another person in an email. Remember, once you hit send you have zero control over where it goes next.
• Don’t say anything that could be misconstrued or taken out of context. It is very easy to say something that you think is perfectly innocent just to have it completely misunderstood, the result of which are bad feelings and the accompanying awkward back pedal. And that one is on you, not the injured party. Pick up the phone or far better yet, if it is sensitive and there is any chance of a missed delivery on your part, have a face-to-face.
• Use email as a follow-up to verbal conversations. Have your meeting or con call and use email after the fact to ensure everyone is on the same page and to indicate responsibility and / or accountability. Example… Subject: Con call follow-up Body: Thanks to everyone on the call today. To recap, Susan you will be following up with the customer, Rick you need to… etc. Now everyone is confirmed to know what’s the deal and no one can say “Sorry – I must have missed that part of the phone call.”

Email is a powerful tool but like a hammer, one ill-advised or poorly worded email and you can have a “swing and a miss” and really get hurt. There are a ton of email do’s and don’ts. Which category do you find yourself in most of the time?

Agree? Disagree? Have some tips of your own? I’ve shared my thoughts; let me know yours.